What Would the Romantics Say?
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‘I find that I cannot exist without poetry – without eternal poetry – half the day will not do’ – John Keats
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The comparison between Romantic poetry and modern life came to me as I was writing a poem about the mould growing in my shoebox bedroom. Earlier that day, I had been reading a collection of Wordsworth’s poems and picturing the characteristic still waters and distant mountain ranges of the Lake District. It struck me how vastly different the practices of the modern writer compare with those of the Romantics. I began a thought-experiment: what would the Romantics say about various aspects of our lives? If that school of poets would be disappointed in our lifestyles, then in what ways might we apply their teachings to help us reach the sublime?
First, it might be helpful to define the sublime. This is a difficult task as it occurs, like love or any other emotion, in various manifestations throughout the canon of Romanticism. The sublime does not have a single catalyst, and its subsequent epiphanies are unique to each artist. Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1957) suggests that ‘[the sublime] is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. Burke believed that negative emotions are the prevailing cause of the sublime, because often humans feel pain more deeply than pleasure. The sublime, then, could be seen as the near-death experience that prompts a moment of enlightenment. In pop-culture, this would be when a character has a revelation as their ‘life flashes before their eyes’. But the Romantics wrote about less fatal encounters as well. For them, the sublime could also be an instance when a person is struck by the vastness of nature. The sublime is the awe in which terror and delight become inextricably connected. Romantic paintings often include the back of a figure staring at a tumultuous ocean or rolling fields – think ‘Wanderer Above Sea Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich or ‘California Spring’ by Albert Bierstadt.
Why should I hike up a mountain to gain enlightenment when I can just turn on the Discovery Channel?
Today, motifs of the sublime can be found beyond the page and canvas. Anyone who saw either of the Dune films might recall the highly praised cinematography, the shots of endless desert that extend into the horizon. With the oversaturation of media in film and television, the imagery of the sublime has become more commonplace. Why should I hike up a mountain to gain enlightenment when I can just turn on the Discovery Channel? Now, through the lens of technology, our access to the sublime has changed. Once when I was younger, maybe twelve, I might have experienced the sublime. I was riding alone on a rollercoaster. When I reached the apex of the loop-de-loop, there was a brief moment before the descent where time slowed and I could see the whole theme park laid out before me. I could see a group waiting behind a fence, taking photos of us on the coaster. In the distance, there was the highway leading towards the rest of California. At that moment, I understood the universe – and then the car plummeted down the tracks.
With the sublime appearing in a multitude of forms to the Romantics, the fact that we are not as concerned with it anymore might be an indication of some kind of social decline. Certainly, if William Wordsworth were alive, I believe that he would immediately reject our gross level of media consumption as another of humanity’s failings. Wordsworth was already criticising mass media in 1800. He believed that industrialisation and early-stage capitalism had led art to become formulaic, something churned out to satisfy the sensationalist appetites of the time. In his ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, he declares, ‘the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants’. Wordsworth derided the quality of the ‘frantic novels’ of the time, so I can only imagine that he would be outraged by the recycled tropes in literature now: fanfiction, jukebox musicals, recent MCU productions – I say as a passive enjoyer of all of the above. These days, publishers have formulas to determine what tropes, narratives and authors will best suit the market. The publishing industry today is surely exponentially more ‘frantic’ than the plays and ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies’ that Wordsworth was ridiculing.
Beyond anything else, Wordsworth’s literary sensibilities would perhaps be most offended by social media, the ultimate ‘violent stimulant’. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth labelled the proliferation of media as ‘the rapid communication of intelligence’. Since the creation of the internet, the way information is conveyed has become more ‘rapid’, but certainly with less ‘intelligence’. Our detrimental relationship with social media and the internet is no better exemplified than through the Oxford Word of the Year of 2024, ‘brain rot’. It’s common to return home after a day of work and plop down to begin hours of scrolling through TikTok, Instagram or even YouTube Shorts. Increased screen time as something to be discouraged is not a revolutionary concept, but an affirmation of what grandparents around the world have been criticising since people still used chat rooms – ‘You spend too much time online!’ If we become too focused on the world within our screens, we might miss the revelations of the external world, its sublimity and the muse of the Romantics.
And yet, we must factor in Wordsworth’s ego as well. It is worth remembering that John Keats, fellow Romantic and fan turned detractor, wrote, ‘I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry. Yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher.’ Wordsworth’s ill-temper, rather than his Romantic sensibilities, might have led him to be the sort of curmudgeon who yells at young people for taking too many photos on holiday. I can just imagine him, as the speaker in ‘Tintern Abbey’, saying to his sister, ‘Put down your phone and just look at the mountains!’
If the meaning of a poem is obvious without breaking scrolling pace, then a core aspect of the form has been lost.
Keats, on the other hand, was a poet who remained unacknowledged by the public in his lifetime. Today, it’s difficult for many to function without social media as a constant source of validation, dopamine and attention. Most people experience little doses of praise through posting their outfits-of-the-day (OOTDs), meals, drinks and activities. New forms of poetry are being produced to fit the format of Instagram and Tiktok. These poems are only a few stanzas long with broad metaphors (usually about fruit) that can be understood within fifteen seconds (or however long it takes to scroll to the next post). On some level, it is a mark of progress to see these poems ‘going viral’ when literacy, historically, is a privilege not afforded to all. For a poem to receive several million likes suggests that literature has become more accessible than ever before. But at the same time, I return to Wordsworth’s concern over ‘the rapid communication of intelligence’. Part of the joy of poetry is puzzling over it: the annotating and decoding. If the meaning of a poem is obvious without breaking scrolling pace, then a core aspect of the form has been lost.
Maybe I am jealous as I have laboured over an Instagram post, only then to see it reach twenty likes. The majority of us will not attain fame or virality. Why persist in throwing art dully into the void? Keats died young and without fame, but in his lifetime, he was a prolific writer. He seemed to have an insatiable passion for creation. In his personal letters, he wrote, ‘I find that I cannot exist without poetry – without eternal poetry – half the day will not do’. He was in love with literature, despite the negative reception to his work. Keats’ life can be taken as a parable for steadfastness, passion that transcends criticism. For me, someone who requires affirmation constantly, Keats is somewhat of a literary idol.
But still, some labelled Keats as an ‘ignorant, unsettled pretender’, criticising him for his middle class beginnings and fantastical poetry. Indeed, if you have ever been in a creative writing workshop, then you must have debated at some point whether or not all art is political. I believe that the Romantics would answer, it is. They wrote during the time of Napoleon, industrialisation, immense poverty and social unrest. While Romantic poetry might have depicted sublime landscapes – sunsets and trembling grass – it was also an attempt at representing the people of Britain through writing in ‘the real language of men’. Poetry was shifting to become a democratising force, providing a voice to the voiceless – namely the working class. Writing into the sublime was not just philosophical posturing; it was also inextricably tied to the political world. Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet titled, The Necessity of Atheism. One of his later poems, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, includes a personified Anarchy to whom soldiers, lawyers and priests proclaim, ‘Thou art King, and God and Lord; / Anarchy, to thee we bow, / Be thy name made holy now!’.
Writing simply for the sake of beauty feels like an infeasible luxury.
‘The Masque of Anarchy’ was written in 1819 following the Peterloo Massacre, a violent, government dispersal of a protest in Manchester. The poem might as well have been written in 2025. In America, censorship has been spreading across the country with states banning literature and ‘critical race theory’ programmes. It seems to me that now, more than ever, the writer is called to consider the political in their work. Writing simply for the sake of beauty feels like an infeasible luxury. Especially considering that while the Romantics often advocated for social issues that did not directly affect them – the class struggle, for example – writing is a method of self-determination for those of marginalised identities. A poem is a form of protest.
While socio-political concerns are recurring themes throughout Romanticism, and poets like Shelley or Wordsworth were attempting to represent the struggles of their country, they were also trying to depict exquisite beauty. In ‘A Defense of Poetry’, Shelley explains, ‘A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’. If it is night, we cannot lie and say it’s morning. If we tried to completely shut out the horrors of the world outside our writing rooms – in my case, my mould-specked bedroom – then they would just stay lurking in the background of every scene like gothic phantoms. The challenge is to continually search for joy. Being a writer is like walking through a storm without a raincoat and hoping to spot just a moment of sunlight. Shelley provides another example in ‘A Defense of Poetry’: ‘Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody’. Like the lyre, the writer has to be open to whatever gust may come their way, but we do have some control. We do not have to solely regurgitate our trauma onto the page. The balance of depicting the sublime is to represent the world, political and natural, in its entirety and still find beauty.
If the sublime is at the mountaintop, we have to do the work of climbing to reach it. All that is to say, we cannot turn off the TV to ignore the news, but we also cannot ignore the sparrows just beyond our windowsill. Romanticism still has value today because the conditions for their writing remain true. In our current moment, it may be more difficult to reach the sublime, but I’m sure the world might be a little bit kinder if everyone tried.
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Lee Hatsumi Mayer is an undergraduate creative writing student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lee was raised in San Francisco and trained for over a decade as a figure skater.
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